Curing Iraq's coder crisis

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Iraqi startups suffer from a critical lack of skilled
coders but a new bootcamp in Baghdad called The Week is trying to
narrow this talent gap.

FikraSpace cofounder Ali Ismail
launched the week-long event, held from November 1-7, after a two
month stint at NASA’s Singularity University in Silicon Valley.

Ismail said he was inspired by conversations with the
university’s VP of innovation and research Vivek Wadhwa and VC
David Rose on how to advance the entrepreneurial ecosystem in
Iraq.

Legal training for coders-turned-entrepreneurs at The Week from
Iraqi law firm Al-Nisour. (Images via Marwan
Ahmed)

The bootcamp adopted a small classroom approach
by selecting 18 participants with backgrounds in coding and a
passion for learning more about what it takes to launch a
startup.

“[It’s] the hands-on experience, rather than
opening the slots for mass participation and boasting about large
participation numbers,” he said. “As you can see, it played out
nicely and everyone can feel the improvement and the skills they
got from The Week.”

Al-Hassan Al-Nassiry, a coding instructor in The
Week, said the significance of the learning experience in the
bootcamp was in building a culture of coding in Iraq.

“What we are doing at The Week is increasing the
culture of hand-coding from scratch among the interested audience.
[They] are not that many in comparison to the non-tech people who
usually comprise the majority of [those at] entrepreneurship events
and meetups,”he said.

The experience was beneficial even for the more
advanced participants, said mobile app developer Amr
Khamis.

“In the first two days, I felt that my
experience did not add to me that much because my coding background
was a bit advanced on the starting point of The Week,” he said.
“But when Ali started [talking about] bootstrapping and then
introduced us to Parse [app development platform], I felt I learnt
a lot.”

Creating new entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurial education was the other
significant aspect of the bootcamp.

Participants dissected Iraqi and international
startups by studying their business models and brainstormed best
practices and challenges with a curriculum inspired by Steve
Blank’s Lean Startup philosophy and Eric Ries’s book The Lean
Startup.

The 17 guest speakers and handful of investors
spoke both in person and via Skype about opportunities, customer
discovery, legal issues, UX Design, and design thinking.

Startup Next director and global Startup Weekend
organizer Elliott Adams joined via Skype from Dublin, and was the
most anticipated guest speaker. He gave an introduction to customer
development and shared his insight on the book “Running
Lean”.

Elliott Adams in Iraq - via Skype.

Coders are critically scarce

Developers in Iraq are scarce. Only about 20-30
percent of attendees at Iraq’s Startup Weekend events identify as
having technical skills.

A survey conducted at the entrepreneurship boot
campSW NEXTin 2013 in Baghdad, found that of 80
people 71 said that any software or hardware skills were not a
result of their education journey.

University computer sciences are not solving the
problem. Students can easily walk into any computer science
department and meet a good number of students in their final year
who don’t know anything about operating systems, or even how to
troubleshoot a simple problem in their personal
computers.

“What we learned in the university was
irrelevant and we didn’t actually practice coding. People memorize
some lines in coding and just write them down on the test papers
without even understanding what’s going on,” said a The Week
participant named only as Mohammed.

Global domination

Ismail’s vision for the bootcamp is to scale
outside of Baghdad to the north and south of Iraq, and then become
an Iraqi brand that would be used in other countries.

“Scalability is my ultimate goal. While the
syllabus and the materials may vary from country to another, the
basic flow and the best practices will be the common factor that
can be applied in the MENA region markets that share common
aspects.”

Iraqi developerAhmed Jamal, a
winner of 2013 Startup Weekend Baghdad and now based in Seattle
working for a startup, said The Week would help coders maintain
their technical skills and help boost entrepreneurship
networks.

“The Week will play an important role developing
the next wave of local entrepreneurs in two aspects: networking the
entrepreneurship enthusiasts and coders with actual local
entrepreneurs and exchange experiences with each other,” he
said.

Disclosure: the author was participating as a
trainer during The Week.